Paul Hayward : Soccer
David Beckham is a 22-year-old millionaire with a Spice Girl on his arm and a Porsche in the garage. Talk to him about Glenn Hoddle, though, and he still sounds like a youth training scheme trainee with a line of mucky boots to scrub.
The first time I came to the England camp the manager took me aside and spoke to me, Beckham says as if recounting a brush with divinity. He explained what he wanted out of me and he also told me to enjoy it. I admired him as a youngster and it was nice having someone like that taking the time to speak to me.
The adoration of his flock is one of Hoddles most formidable assets. I doubt whether theres a player under 25 who didnt have a poster of him on their bedroom wall. He talks, they listen, says a former Tottenham team-mate. But there are other strengths. With Englands victory in Poland and the winning of the Tournoi de France the initial sniffiness about Hoddles appointment has dried up. The cognoscenti may be still whispering it but they are saying England have found a coach to compare with Europes best.
Hoddle is just over one year into the unenviable task of closing the chasm between English talent and expectations. That distance is narrowing. Moldova, Englands opponents on Wednesday, were the beginning and end of a 12-month cycle that has given Hoddles dazzled pupils a clear chance of qualifying for next summers World Cup. The true test of English progress will be the gladiatorial encounter with Italy on October 11 in Rome.
A frequently evaded truth about England is that they stand stubbornly outside the four-nation elite of world football. The games mother country routinely see off large swathes of the atlas but seldom beat Italy, Brazil, Germany or Argentina. Only twice have England progressed beyond the quarter-finals of a World Cup in 1966 and 1990. Hoddle, a student of the world game, says: Theres still a long way to go before we can say, yes, we can live with the very best.
After the moist-eyed effusiveness of Bobby Robson, Graham Taylors spectacular self- combustion and the bonhomie of Terry Venables, Hoddle is a curiously unflappable, inscrutable leader. Last year people thought that was a fault. Now they think it is a virtue, because it implies an inner solidity and fearlessness in the face of Taylors impossible job. Old friends from his Tottenham days say they never had any doubt he would succeed. Glenn can stand outside a whirlwind. He has that detachment.
There was a touch of the headmasters entrance about Hoddles appointment. Venables, a conspicuously hard act to follow, tried to make positive use of English footballs carousing instincts. He fostered team spirit by being the sharpest wit in the class and calling Schools out for the weekend whenever England were stuck in camp for a whole week. Last weekend the players again went home but only because they had assembled so early. Hoddle now keeps them at their desks throughout the build-up.
Much of his work is done behind the screen of beech trees that conceals Englands idyllic training ground in rugger and rowing country along the Thames. As coach of Chelsea he transformed the club from the studs up. He set up a training manual concentrating on skills, made all Chelsea teams play the same way, improved diets and encouraged players to think about the game long after the cologne had been splashed on and the sports car driven away. It was an incremental cultural change which is now becoming apparent with England.
The players had to yield ground. It was Hoddles misfortune to have inherited so many tortured souls and lager-splashed problems which, to him, will have illuminated another traditional failing of English football. Wife-beating, alcoholism, drink driving, addictions to gambling and drugs and the kind of inflammatory spasms to which Ian Wright succumbs do not tend to come up often in the Italian and German teams.
In these areas Hoddle has tended towards pragmatism, defending Wright (because he needs him, with Shearer missing?) and simultaneously chastising and supporting Rio Ferdinand by dropping him from the squad while allowing him to carry on training at Bisham. Talk to those closest to Hoddle and they leave you in no doubt he is tired of dealing with such uniquely English complications. By banning weekend leave, cutting down the lager quotas and making the players train in the afternoon, as they do on the Continent, Hoddle is trying to effect a longer-term shift in the way our footballers treat their bodies and jobs.
If he fails, he will go down convinced he was right, which is the only way to sink. He still believes he picked the right team against Italy at Wembley in February. That result a 1-0 defeat showed where England really stood. Hoddle was criticised for experimenting with Matthew Le Tissier (withdrawn after 60 minutes) and with Ian Walker in goal. He defends both selections, but has not gambled so recklessly since. Within 36 hours of the game he was in his office studying tapes of the match to work out where England had gone wrong.
As a player he was caricatured as a kind of Narcissus, a very un-English concoction of influences which did not include, to the consternation of the Hackney Marshes tendency, the British bulldog qualities of chasing and snapping at heels. It was Arsne Wenger, at Monaco, who liberated him from defensive duties. But just as Hoddles greatest import, Ruud Gullit, attacks the prima donna tendencies he himself so often displayed as a player with Holland, so Hoddle has acknowledged that a successful England team must encompass the traditional Anglo-Saxon elements of fire and ice.
The champagne footballer, as Mark Hateley called him, lost in dreams about the beautiful game? David Batty was discarded by Venables after nearly slicing Juninho in half two years ago during the Umbro Trophy, but has been a regular in Hoddles teams often with Paul Ince, thus doubling the combative ball-winning component in midfield. When Hoddle took over after Euro 96, we assumed Stuart Pearce would trudge back to his kennel; Hoddle talked him out of international retirement. It is in the alliance of English hearts and foreign minds that Hoddle has staked his future.
From here the gradient rises. Hoddle has lost Shearer until the new year and Sheringham probably until after the Italy game. Tony Adams, another strand in Englands strong spine, is only intermittently fit. But, in the Tournoi, Paul Scholes was blooded as Sheringhams understudy and Sol Campbell has been nurtured as a new, improved Adams. Confidence is still high. Weve got the atmosphere of a club, says Batty. I played against Glenn Hoddle when he was at Chelsea so hes in touch with the lads hes managing.
Hes taken it on well. It looks very promising, says Venables. For him, as with Hoddle, aesthetically pleasing football is only any good if it gets you to a World Cup. The football we are seeing now might not be Hoddles finished product but it is laying a path to France. When I took over last year the object was pretty clear in my mind: get to the World Cup, Hoddle says. If and when were there we might approach it differently, but for now weve just got to get there.
He always had vision, says an old ally at Spurs. While the rest of us were scrabbling around in the dark in difficult moments, for Glenn the room was illuminated. That light is starting to spread.